Lookout Cartridge (7 page)

I know what it is for a trip to drift away from you. I wasn’t exactly showing myself around New York this trip. It’s always a less clear place than the New York of the English papers where key statistics lurk well behind crisp narratives of snipers and rapists and the junky whose luck it was to pinch a wallet full of hot bills.

Sub had to go to Washington this weekend, a rush call to design a program for a new client. I didn’t know what he was doing about the children.

On Third Avenue a library looked ready to open where a car park had been; a carton labeled Encyclopedia Americana was stacked on other cartons in the dusty vestibule. At a sidewalk taco counter next door to a bar I looked the Puerto Rican proprietor (if he was Puerto Rican and the proprietor) in the eye and decided instead to get a bite when I met the charter man.

The scene of the stabbing when I arrived was just another intersection. People brushed past me when the light changed. In the florist’s I asked what had happened to the victim’s car. The proprietor said the man was dead by the time the ambulance got through, they’d covered him up. The phone rang and turning toward it he said, You didn’t think they’re going to leave a car in the middle of the street. I said, I’m in the aerial business, I want to know why that one broke. But the proprietor had picked up and was talking. There were a few deep red sweetheart roses in the refrigerator case and I wanted to take some.

But now a woman with a handful of dark green leaves was standing next to the refrigerator, and some pom-poms behind the glass were the same rusty orange as the enamel butterfly on her breast.

I asked
who
had covered the man up.

The sweetheart roses were tight and alive.

The woman’s cheekbones were abnormally wide, her chin narrowed nearly to a point. Her gray-black hair was parted in the middle and drawn down close upon her temples and over her ears. She might be thirty-eight, she wore no rings, her lips broke with a light exhalation and her laugh was not only happy it was the laugh I’d heard just after someone said Jersey plates and just as the driver was coming around his car to have it out with the man I was certain was Jim.

You laughed just before the accident, I said.

Call the precinct if you want to know about the car, she said, but they’ll want to know why. You can tell
them
you’re in the aerial business.

The woman couldn’t help smiling again. She turned her profile to me. In profile you might have thought her face narrow.

The proprietor was saying, But Father Moran, that’s
been
our price.

The woman said, It was no accident. She reached to close the door she’d come through from the dark storeroom.

Neither blood nor skid tracks marked the site of the stabbing. A garter snap was imbedded in the tar street just beyond the curb. I figured the woman in the florist’s would do something.

A cab waiting at the light had a black rubber-looking bumper with button like plugs all along it and a woman driving. The cab moved on, and a little girl in a blue coat kneeling on the back seat waved to me. My eyes came back to the garter snap and the tar.

The woman was next to me and I was exactly where Jim had been before he stepped into the street. She didn’t talk like a gossip.

Someone brought a piece of canvas out of one of these buildings and covered him, but not his face. The man who killed him just stuck the aerial out not even in self-defense, you know what I mean? He didn’t seem shocked. And when he turned and walked away I saw you and you looked like you saw something over your shoulder and you turned around and got out of here in a hurry. It didn’t seem like it was just to miss the crowd. I remember you. That raincoat.

You saw the man’s face.

He turned right at me, he walked past the window, and I looked him over. Good-looking man.

The florist was in his doorway by the pussy willows calling her. Her name was Gilda.

You’d know him again?

Got a picture? She put a hand on my arm. You’re not police and you’re not an aerial salesman. You don’t feel like insurance either.

You’d know
me
again, eh Gilda?

Now I would.

I stepped off the curb and looked to see if a car was turning. But my light was now red and a crosstown car blew past. I stepped back onto the curb; the woman Gilda was reentering the florist shop. Instead of crossing I turned and walked the way Jim had gone, and Gilda smiled at me in the window.

I was walking as if that handsome woman had put into my head that I could catch up to Jim even here two and a half hours past the stabbing. For-as if it were somewhere in my body-I felt a tissue of collaboration between Claire and Jim. The trench coat snug across my shoulders, I would go to meet the charter man on foot rather than hop a bus stopping every other block or relax in the back seat of a cab held in mid afternoon traffic. A flag out over the sidewalk signaled a post office and I dropped off my postcards. Our more observant neighbors in London would have been interested to see Lorna clipping rose bushes today as she’d told me she would, for our garden was notorious not only for its roaming tortoise but also for its untended growth. The London County Council man who called on us unexpectedly during the summer after I’d failed to answer letters wished us good morning and asked to see the garden behind the house, and when he’d done so he said they’d have the grass cut at our expense if I didn’t have it done. At the front door as he was going and the hall clock rattled as if about to disintegrate, and began to chime, he mentioned the tortoise. Its lawn-droppings had been reported by neighbors who cited our erratic fencing, but must have seen the tortoise as something from the States when in fact a couple of years ago Lorna had simply come upon it solid and headless, a brown and patterned stone, in a permanently spongy portion at the far end. The L.C.C. man as he left hesitated ill our front doorway in late-morning light, I halfway between him and Lorna, Lorna at the other end of the marble-floored front hall on the first step of the curving stairway whose pale oak we’d scraped layers of white paint off and refinished up to the landing where there was a leaded red-and-yellow-stained floral window that kept one from seeing the disgraceful garden in back. He wondered if the tortoise could be contained. Then he said, You’ve been over here now for…? And in response to his breathing I said, Let’s call a turtle turd a turtle turd, and behind me Lorna laughed. He reemphasized that the lawn was the first priority; it was eleven, the final stroke had been flung out, and as the door scraped gently to, I turned toward Lorna and my eye passed a large photo of Jenny and Billy running downhill in Water low Park ten years ago but I wasn’t thinking exactly that at this moment they were in school. I felt in the old way American, American with Lorna—who now asked me if I would like to come upstairs.

The sun was on the bed, the bed was unmade but quite neat.

Claire had wanted me at her flat probably because I’d be trouble at the office. But who there knew me? And Phil Aut wouldn’t have had to see me.

I detoured seeking a record shop to get the Joni Mitchell for Lorna.

What if Claire had been told to do nothing more with this film matter but had felt she had to see me? Hence, the Friday cable. Lorna had ripped it open—Aha, Claire likes older men.

After I’d read it Lorna sat on the piano stool and read it again, languidly young in her white nightgown. She said nothing about the film.

Midafternoon Manhattan pressured my eyes so stepping off the curb at Park and Fiftieth looking into the blue fish-eye sky bordered by hard-edged tops of buildings and farther north a penthouse tree, I was sensitive to the words of a blind man whom I’d just stepped around: Could you help me? But a girl was already there with her hand on his arm asking if he wanted to cross. He said would she let him feel her. She nodded, and looked at me. Then he asked again, and she said Sure.

He held her shoulder, touched her cheek and hair and ear. He said Yes, and she said OK? and I followed them west across Park to the traffic island where because of their slow pace they ran out of green light and she stopped. He held on.

It would be different in the dark, for there the girl wouldn’t see either. To be blind making love in the light with someone not blind.

Quite different from being a lookout prevented from communicating what you see.

The girl put her free hand over his face and as she drew the fingertips down, she spread her thumb and little finger to miss his eyes. He gave her index a peck as it came by.

She looked at me, at the light, at me, and took the man across the rest of the way. She disengaged herself and said Bye, looked unsmiling at me, and swung off down the block toward Madison.

A frail, white-haired woman spoke to the man and passed on.

A girl was at the curb and they talked and then he touched her. They went east right back across Park but made it all the way in one light because she hurried him as if they had a mutual appointment. She didn’t touch his face, but she did look at me. With compassion. For him.

Being three blocks from the New York branch of the scientific hobby firm for which I periodically acted as U.K. sales scout reminded me I’d put off till later in the week my visit to them. I had to look over for the English Yuletide an enlarged 1500-watt three channel color organ that turns sound into light and can operate two hundred Christmas tree lamps and three 50-watt spots simultaneously.

I looked close into the blind man’s eyes and whether he smelled Claire’s soybeans in my teeth or had activated that spatial sense blind heads are known to possess; he said, So what are you looking at, pal? and was not about to feel my nose.

I said I’d just made the round trip across Park Avenue and wondered how far
he
usually got.

In an undertone so his eyes seemed to be putting up a front for an audience he didn’t want to hear this, he said, You know what you can do with your round trip.

God knows what flashback he saw when I looked into his pale squint. He was blind all right.

But what was I doing—I wasn’t here seeing sights—this round trip of mine was not routine and I seemed to be having a time getting uptown to my charter man whom I’d never met face to face. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure the drink with him was quite the casual drink he’d let it seem, even though he would continue to need someone at the London end. His predecessor, a portly youth, had graduated from City College and split to Hamilton, Ontario, and a part-time job at a travel agency run by a Genoese immigrant capitalizing on the considerable Italian community.

I told the blind man I’d stop by again if I was in the area if he didn’t mind and he said he did-and on the point of remembering what Jenny had asked me to bring back this trip, I set out again. But there were cloudy screens at many distances and all around in more directions than Gotham’s old grid seems to permit, and I myself a projection out of focus unless aimed at the right screen.

An oriental with a good camera snapped a dozen pictures from curb to curb crossing Park at Fifty-second and kept snapping even after a car honked him into a jump shot that I stepped back out of.

If I didn’t get to the charter man, I was still less than twenty-four hours past that twilight holding-pattern at Kennedy and if this throbbing horizontal gravity kept me from getting uptown to see the charter man today, I still had two or three weeks.

I could not know naturally that today was not the day I was going to be shoved down a dead escalator, as if some private-spirited mechanic at wit’s end were trying to prime those stopped steps with living feet. I couldn’t know for sure that Jim and Claire weren’t linked—hell, the people you know tend to do the same things as you—in New York you see a French bloke you haven’t seen in three years suddenly in the lobby at a festival of horror films contemplating popcorn through the glass counter, his hand detached below a leather sleeve; or in London at the end of a bad day you catch an Arts Council Show and in the first of its series of American interiors you sit down in a Vegas madam’s 1943 parlor that’s traveled from California to Germany and now here to London on the way back home and you listen to the authentic jukebox and you cross eyes with a blue-uniformed guard who looks away as you wonder if he ever heard “Don’t Fence Me In” during the Blitz, but now at eyelevel from Roxy’s seedy armchair where you’re sitting two new knees materialize and they turn out to be knees that followed yours at the Cinderella Ball in Brooklyn Heights a year later in ’44, for you move up past them to a Lincoln green wool hem and thence in a rush to Renee’s russet shag that is not russet now but hot San Francisco copper: Reneé—for Christ sake
Renée
-opens her bright mouth, moans, and reaches at you and as you incredulously get up almost falls into your lap there in the easy chair of your traveling brothel but a moving lap is hard to find and as Renee says quite loud, Missed it in L.A., had to see it here, the russet hair you mouthed on Brooklyn Heights flies back in your face here half a mile from Buckingham Palace at this summer show (where in Days of old, Knights were bold) and the same low-pitched voice you once kissed gives you a twenty-five-year résumé and when the Crosby changes in the bright dome of this jukebox that transcends nickles and dimes, the mouth takes a breath, its breasts rise, and it asks where you’re staying—and you don’t know where to start, here in Merry England, where Knights were bold and ladies not particular. You shrug (as if amused): I’m making a film—and she says, Oh you’re on location, and you say, No I mean I live here. She says, We’re going to Stratford tomorrow, and you say be sure and go over to Warwick Castle to see the peacocks.

What’s your film called? she says, and when you ask for ideas she says, Murder in Murmansk.

Where does time pass on a day in New York? Is that what my eyes were bucking? all that time-waste recycled as dirty air thus dense enough to be like the looking glass in some tale I read Jenny who was then Ginny in which if you wish you can see what’s happening somewhere else? I walked east and south and east again, I was between the first opening which had been mine and the next which had to be Outer Film’s.